ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Tulips, in several Colours barr’d,
Were then the Switzers of our Guard.
The Gardiner had the Souldiers place,
And his more gentle Forts did trace.
The Nursery of all things green
Was then the only Magazeen.
The Winter Quarters were the Stoves,
Where he the tender Plants removes.
But War all this doth overgrow:
We ord’nance Plant and Powder sow.
And yet their walks one on the Sod
Who, had it pleased him and God,
Might once have made our Gardens spring
Fresh as his own and flourishing.
But he preferr’d to the Cinque Ports
These five imaginary Forts:
And, in those half-dry Trenches, spann’d
Pow’r which the Ocean might command.
276
(stanzas 41–4)
Criticism on this tonally complex section of the poem almost always
concentrates on determining Marvell’s response to Fairfax’s retreat. Is Marvell
paying Fairfax a left-handed compliment? Is Fairfax right to prefer his “five
imaginary Forts” to the Cinque Ports? To the extent that scholars weigh the
patronage system in their analysis, they differ in the latitude they allow Marvell
to “advise” his patron; but the one thing which is not at issue here, and perhaps
because it is not it rarely attracts extra attention from the reader, is the elegantly
complicated but unalloyed nature of Marvell’s attachment to England. At the
center of this “country house” poem is a lament for “country” in the widest sense,
with the echo from John of Gaunt’s dying speech in Richard II serving to predate
the sentiments here to a time before Jonson’s classically hierarchical celebration
of ideal English society in “To Penshurst.” More inclusive in its reiterated use of
“we,” this section is also, in an important sense, less bound by the past. For if
Marvell’s “we” all shared in tasting the “luckless Apple” that did make “us
Mortal, and The[e] Wast,” the ensuing fall is not presented as being necessarily
absolute. Fairfax might have preferred his “conscience” to his country at this
juncture in English history, but since England’s renovation is imagined as
dependent upon a fruitful conjunction between the right individual and God—
and has nothing to do with social politics of a Jonsonian sort—the possibility
remains open in the future for someone else, but not Fairfax, to make “our
Gardens spring.”
The uncanny way in which Marvell forecloses one possibility only to open